After two successful quarters at Ohio State in the FEH program, I can now officially consider myself a college student.  I can also consider myself fully switched over from Windows to Mac.  I can’t say it’s been painless, but I think I’m glad it happened. First thing’s first.  Install Better Touch Tool.  This program allows you to set up super-useful gestures on the trackpad (on top of the built-in Apple ones) and allows you to […]

This is a super old post that remained in drafts for forever…finally publishing. The moment of truth!  So I spent a RIDICULOUS amount of time this summer researching basically every laptop on the market.  I learned a lot and changed my mind a lot.  But basically here’s what I learned…hope this helps you. 1. Tablets = Meh.  If you recall (hint: look at old posts) I was pretty set on getting a tablet for college…or […]

Many people I know have recently started to use the music service Spotify for all their music needs, and while Spotify is an amazing and extremely useful program, the reality of the situation is that using it is a poor decision in the long run. I’ve been using Spotify for around four months now. Spotify’s great in the sense that I no longer have to download music myself and keep track of it / store […]

Gone are the days when you needed to pay $50 a year for Norton’s or McAfee Antivirus programs.  Microsoft released (awhile ago) Microsoft Security Essentials – a free, really good anti-virus solution.  I won’t go into detail here because there’s not much to it.  Basically you go HERE, download and install it, and you’re protected forever!  It auto-updates, auto-runs, and tells you if it detects anything spooky.  Just watch out for the little green icon […]

While there are only a few good photo organization / editing programs on a mac (namely iPhoto), there are hundreds available for the PC.  Many people use the Nikon or Kodak software that came with their cameras, but most people seem to either use Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery. Personally, I use Windows Live Photo Gallery…and here’s why. 1. When you make a change in Picasa, IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY SAVE THE CHANGE TO THE […]

It’s scary to think that I’ll have to make the decision of where I’m going to college in a little over 3 months.  It’s also scary to think that this summer I’ll have to make a decision on what laptop (or tablet) to buy for college…a decision I’ve been thinking about since I was in the sixth grade (no, really, I’m that cool). I think it was around the sixth or seventh grade that I […]

This post has been sitting in my drafts as “6 months in” for, well, six months.  So I ordered my Nexus One on January 5th, 2010.  It’s now been a year; and what a year it has been.  I was reading over some of my old posts about the Nexus One a few weeks back and I was surprised by how future proof I thought the phone would be…  I’m not upset with where I […]

I recently discovered the use of Google Chrome’s “pinned tabs” feature.  I used this for a few days, decided to write about it, and then stopped using them.  So what happened? What are “pinned tabs”?  If you right click a tab in Google Chrome, you can click “pin tab” and it will make it into a “mini-tab” (see picture above) which doesn’t take up much room.  This is good if you have a few tabs […]

Internet Explorer 9 (Beta) has finally arrived.  Generally, this wouldn’t be exciting news.  People would say “oh they made a new Internet Explorer.  I actually use a decent browser…so I don’t care”.  But Microsoft actually delivered with this browser!  Keep in mind while reading my “review” that I never really used this for more than a few minutes…but in those few minutes, I was really impressed with how much this version is improved over IE […]

Here is my list of extensions that makes Chrome usable for me.  Keep in mind that I used Firefox for a solid four years before switching to Chrome, so a lot of these extensions duplicate the behavior of different Firefox features. AdThwart – This extension does a decent job of blocking advertisements on sites.  I really wouldn’t recommend using it unless ads bother you that much because a lot of people (including me) make money […]